Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the Indian classical musician, who died on June 18 aged
87, was the world's leading exponent of the 25-stringed instrument called
the sarod.

Photo: GETTY

6:27PM BST 21 Jun 2009

Khan established music schools in Calcutta, California (where he was based from 1965 onwards) and Switzerland. He toured throughout the world, and composed and recorded prolifically, generally releasing between one and six albums a year. In 1955 he became the first Hindustani (north Indian) classical musician to record a microgroove LP as a soloist; and among several film scores, he wrote the music for The Householder (1963), the first Merchant/Ivory film.

In 1971 he appeared with his former brother-in-law Ravi Shankar at the Concert For Bangladesh, alongside its organiser George Harrison, Ringo Star, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and later in his career he was nominated for five Grammies.

Khan was "discovered" by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who first met him on a visit to India in 1952, declaring him to be "an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world". Within three years, Menuhin had facilitated Khan's breakthrough as an international artist, organising his American debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

On this initial visit, Khan also recorded Music Of India: Morning and Evening Ragas (Angel, 1955) and appeared on Alistair Cooke's television show, Omnibus. In the same year he made the first of many visits to Britain, performing in London at the Royal Festival Hall. Until then, Indian classical music was almost unknown in the Western world, and his work anticipated its worldwide popularity in the 1960s, notably when The Beatles fell under its spell.

The music journalist Ken Hunt, who befriended Khan and wrote the sleeve notes for the Grammy-nominated album Legacy (1996), a collaboration with Asha Bhosle, has described Khan as a warm, generous man who also had a didactic, disciplinarian side, an inevitable consequence of his many years of rigorous training.

Ali Akbar Khan was born on April 14 1922 at the village of Shivpur, near Comilla, in what was then East Bengal (now Bangladesh). His father, Ustad Allauddin Khan, was a revered teacher/guru (hence the Muslim title "Ustad") steeped in a musical tradition dating from the 16th century – he is said to have played up to 200 instruments, and his son began studying music from the age of three.

Initially, his father taught him vocal music while an uncle tutored him in percussion before he was directed towards the sarod. By the age of 13 he had given his first public appearance, but many years of gruelling training – sometimes lasting 18 hours a day – were still before him. As he once said: "If you practise for 10 years, you may begin to please yourself. After 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience. After 30 years you may please even your guru. But you must practise for many more years before you finally become a true artist – then you may please even God." His father was 100 years old before he felt ready to bestow on his son the title of Swara Samrat ("Emperor of Melody").

Khan wrote first composition, Mali Gaura, in 1935, for the Maihar band, a group of local orphans established by his father to play for his patron, the Maharaja of Maihar. By his early twenties, Khan had made his first appearances on All India Radio (AIR) and began recording 78s for the HMV label. In 1943 he became the court musician for the Maharaja of Jodhpur, a position that earned the title Ustad. The next year he became AIR's youngest-ever musical director.

In 1948 he moved to Bombay, where he began composing film scores. His most notable early successes were for Chetan Anand's Aandhiyan (1952), Tapan Sinha's award-winning Khudita Pashan and Satyajit Ray's Devi (both 1960). In 1993 he would score Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha.

The year after his debuts in America and Britain, Khan established the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta. In the 1960s he founded two schools in California, and in 1985 he launched a branch at Basle, Switzerland, leaving his disciple Ken Zuckerman in charge, but visiting as a teacher when on his regular world tours.

Although without question an innovator, Khan is perhaps most revered for his unwillingness to compromise his music, which was based on traditional Hindustani ragas, a system of melodic templates in ascending and descending scales. Unusually, he was known to play whole concerts of the alaap (the introductory section of most ragas, played in free rhythm with only a drone accompaniment), known to be most testing for a musician.

From the mid-1960s, his work occasionally became more experimental. Among his best-known collaborations were those with Yvette Mimieux on the album Flowers of Evil: Six Poems of Baudelaire (1968) and a brace of Indo-jazz fusion albums with the saxophonist John Handy, Karuna Supreme (1975) and Rainbow (1981), later reissued on CD.

Predating Live Aid by 14 years, and paving the way for this type of charity event, the Concert For Bangladesh took place at Madison Square Gardens on August 1 1971, to benefit refugees of Cyclone Bhola and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Khan famously opened the concert in a jugalbandi (instrumental duet) with Ravi Shankar, an echo of their first such artistic pairing back in 1939. He was later less than complimentary about the concert, describing it as "a war of music" and admitting to having used lavatory paper as ear plugs.

In 1997 Khan received the National Heritage Fellowship Award of the US National Endowment for the Arts, an occasion for which he composed Narayani Gauri, which featured on his album Swara Samrat (2003). In the same year he performed at the UN in New York and at the Kennedy Centre in Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of India's independence.

In recent years Ustad Ali Akbar Khan had suffered ill health, which restricted his public appearances. He is survived by his third wife, Mary, and by 11 children.